Market Size and Trade in Medical Services

主讲人：Jonathan I. Dingel（Chicago Booth, CEPR, and NBER）

主持人：余昌华（北京大学国家发展研究院）

时间：2022年11月8日（周二）上午9:00-10:30（北京时间）

地点：承泽园246教室

Zoom会议号：926 3889 7210

密码：908060

摘要：

We quantify the roles of increasing returns and trade costs in medical services. Using data on millions of Medicare claims, we document that “imported” medical procedures—defined as a patient's consumption of a service produced by a medical provider in a different region—constitute about one-fifth of US healthcare consumption. Larger markets specialize in the production of less common procedures, and these procedures are more traded between regions. These patterns reflect economies of scale: larger regions produce higher-quality care because they serve more patients. Revealed-preference estimates of quality, which are positively related to external measures of quality of care, have a scale elasticity around 0.7. We use these estimates to evaluate the proximity-concentration tradeoff associated with various policy options for improving access to medical care.

主讲人介绍：

Jonathan I. Dingel is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. His research agenda focuses on the spatial distribution of economic activities across neighborhoods, cities, and countries. He tries to understand the substantial variation in the amount and nature of economic activity across space. In 2022, his research was recognized by the Bhagwati Award and August-Lösch Prize. At Booth, he teaches Managing the Firm in the Global Economy.